China ’09

And so the journey begins...

In November 2009, I made my first trip overseas since taking a serious interest in photography again; and while, as on most of my other trips abroad, photography was not the primary purpose, this trip did have a serious photographic objective. To put it briefly, I felt in the 3 months leading up to the trip, I had lost my photographic motivation and I was hoping that a change of scene, a change of routine, new places and new experiences would help revive it. If you want to know more about why my motivation was flagging, you can read about it in my essay entitled Photographic Vision. But here, I want to talk about the trip and the photographic experiences it offered me.

We set off on November 12, a Thursday, bound for Hong Kong and an opportunity for me to meet up with a bunch of Fickr photographers, some of whom I’d known since I first started seriously using Flickr. But first of all, I’d have to navigate my way through Friday the 13th.